Our Mixed Emotions About Parents’ Weekend

Thumbs Up

Parents’ Weekend: ’Tis a great time of the year. The weather was magnificent, and the campus was looking beautiful this past weekend. Although it has been but a few short weeks since we bid farewell to our parents to return to Boston College at the end of August, it was nonetheless a wonderful opportunity to catch up, among other things. We think, in the short time we had available, we managed to accomplish all of the major activities of Parents’ Weekend—meals with parents and roommates, stocking our fridge, and Pops on the Heights. As per usual, the Pops were fantastic. Our fridge now has so much food that we think we could not leave our dorm for the next month and still survive.

Thumbs Down

Parents’ Weekend: Sometimes, we just need to get some work done. Also, we are embarrassed about the state of our rooms, and often, the state of our lives. Parents always in a rush to see everything and meet everyone, but they walk so slowly. And, for those of us who are orphaned on Parents’ Weekend, it is just a sad reminder of the fact that we feel unloved.

Alumni Parents Reminiscing: We don’t really want to know on which campus shrubberies you vomited … and that was the only appropriate example that was discussed at the tailgate.

Recruiting Season: Don’t get us wrong, we are thrilled that enough companies think highly of BC to fill weeks in September and October with information sessions, networking events, and interviews in the Career Center. We are very lucky to have that. It is, however, a completely draining experience. We have lost track of the number of hours of our evenings we have spent at these events. It takes up such an absurd amount of time that it is surprising that much else gets done during September and the beginning of October.

Pre-Graduation Engagements: Two people in our high school class are now engaged, and not to each other. This makes us so incredibly uncomfortable. Yeah, we get it—where we come from below the Mason-Dixon line, stuff is a little bit different, and this sort of thing happens on a regular basis. We just did not expect it in our class. This makes a solid 4.7 percent of our class that is now engaged. Here’s the real kicker—right after graduation, a couple of our friends and us sat around and made a collective prediction of who would be the first three members of our class to get engaged. Neither of these guys made the Top Three. By our estimates, guided by the expert advice of four bookies, two actuaries, and a washed-up statistics teacher who is probably a little bit unstable, we think that there will be at least one more proposal before we graduate. That is a terrifying thought. Well, at least this means weddings to attend, which means wedding receptions, which means open bars. We love open bars. We can do our best to forget the fact that we spent most of our college career with Adobe InDesign as the only significant other in our lives.

The Boston College Graduate Employees Union (BCGEU-UAW) released a letter on Oct. 31, in which it said that the University had disciplined over a dozen graduate students in response to flyering efforts on Sept. 28. […]